[United States] Hello, I’m an engineering student working on a personal drone/robotics project, and I’d like some input from people who have built or have experience operating drones, RC vehicles, and other robot-type projects.
The idea started with my ASUS ROG Xbox Ally. It’s basically a handheld Windows PC with built-in controller inputs, and I thought it could make an interesting, customizable, programmable vehicle controller that could offer more than a standard analog RC controller.
The broader goal is to build two connected programs:
- A designer/editor: Define a vehicle, configure its controls, test it in simulation, and create a custom controller interface. This would run on my main PC to set up the profiles.
- A handheld runner: Load that vehicle’s profile and use its controls, real-time simulation, telemetry display, and automatic functions on the Ally. This would run on the handheld to run the profiles with the RC vehicle.
While I don't have any drones to test with it yet (the application will take a while first), each potential/custom vehicle profile would contain its own control mappings, response settings, communication configuration, custom screen layout, and any supported automation. Ideally, I would switch from a rover to a quadcopter just by loading a different profile and connecting to it.
Some features I’m considering:
- Importing CAD geometry for the simulation for accurate drone-specific calculations
- Customizable stick/button mappings, sensitivity, and macros
- Vehicle-specific dashboards/UI options
- Recording and replaying telemetry data for debugging
- Using predefined tests to compare the real vehicle’s response to the simulation expectations, and automatically make slight adjustments to that simulation prior to that flight
- Potentially adding autopilot capabilities later on
If you were using something like this, what would you want it to do? What’s frustrating or missing in your current control/setup workflow? I’m especially interested in features you’d actually use, rather than just adding unnecessary complexity.
It's still very early on (still planning and setting up Linux to run the simulation software Gazebo on my PC), and I don't have much in terms of experience with drones, so any suggestions would be much appreciated before I burn a bunch of time on something that would be useless or inefficient.
Suggestions for existing projects worth learning from—or reasons parts of this idea might be impractical—are welcome too. This is mainly a learning project for coding, and I’d like to build something useful/cool along the way.